The cynic in me thinks that's the entire point. Things like this an the free community college are great but he has to be going into it with confidence that it'll never happen under the current climate. For the community college proposal I'd go so far as to say it can't work in America at all because American's don't care about each other enough to support something like that. But now that he's at the second half of his second term he can at least propose these things and go out saying "I tried ...".

I'm not so sure that Americans don't care enough about each other to support the community college proposal. I haven't really heard any opposition to it from any of my friends or acquaintances. In fact, it's actually quite difficult to argue against. The GOP-controlled Congress is going to have a pretty hard time building support for opposition to the proposal, although I'm sure they'll figure out some way to do it.

Comments sections on some sites have had the regular "way to waste money ..." types of comments but that's hardly indicative of the nation as a whole. The reason I believe it will run up against a lot of opposition is because every year when my town sends out the breakdown of how taxes were spent I can't count the number of people I hear whining about school taxes already. "I don't have any kids in school so why the hell should I have to pay for it!?" is a VERY common theme in my area. Maybe it's not as common everywhere, this is a big diverse place after all, but it's common enough that some places have started to implement charter schools as a response to it.

The best argument I've heard, that I agree with in a way, is that we should first focus on fixing our broken pre-college school system. I don't see why we couldn't do both at the same time but if we're forced to pick one or the other I'd agree that that is probably of greater importance. Though that's a separate debate :)

Yeah, I don't see why you folks couldn't fix both the school and the college system at the same time. You should be free to fix your problems in any order you want.

Just remember that I don't have kids in school nor in college, and taking my money to pay for more unfireable teachers is not "fixing".

You're entirely right, it is the entire point of his proposals.

Why else would he be floating proposals he knows can never pass, except to be winning cheap gains from the suckers who don't see it for what it is? A president proposing a huge program like free college for everyone without controlling Congress is basically talking to a wall.

Obama is trying to help the Democratic party with its stagnant voter base problem. The people who would regularly vote Democrat have moved far to the left of the Democratic mainline and are tired of seeing nothing come out of the Democratic party, meaning that they no longer have any motivation to vote for Democrats-- not to say they are voting for Republicans either.

Sure, you're going to say Obamacare came out of the Democracts-- but the left leaning segment of the Democratic base didn't want Obamacare, they wanted single payer, and Obamacare fell horrendously short of that. This election was a wakeup call for the Democrats, and indicated to them that they have lost their base to the more radical members of their party like Elizabeth Warren.

Thus, we see the Democrats attempt to show people that they still have big ideas, because they are incapable of showing people that they have big actions.

I've become extremely disillusioned with US Politics and I find it hard to not be apathetic about it no matter how much I don't want to be. It seems like everyone treats it as a big game. Just look at the landscape and how its implemented. Talking heads providing endless commentary, the entire country being broken into teams, people taking sides and playing favorites, presidential elections have more in common with American Idol than with actual political elections, politicians being more concerned with being the "winner", or at least not being the "loser", than doing what's right (even when "right" is defined by their own beliefs). I'm sure its always been like this in some way but it feels like it just gets worse every election cycle.

The truth is probably somewhere in between. Obama can't be maneuvering for re-election, of course, but can try to set things up for the 2016 elections.

But good legislation does not just magically appear in Congress. Many government programs got a big boost from the President "calling for them"--national parks, for example, or the moon landings. These were not new ideas when Roosevelt or Kennedy spoke about them, but speaking about them helped generate the public momentum for Congress to act.

The U.S. was the first nation in the world to provide free, publicly funded education through high school. It was implemented locally, but it was an idea that was discussed and promoted nationally. The idea of free education is a powerful one in the U.S. culture.

And many community colleges are already heavily funded by state and local governments; making them totally free might not be as big a step as it seems on paper.

One can argue that the problem is that we've cared too much, not that we don't care at all. The biggest argument I've heard against it from various sources is just "Where's the money going to come from?" Individually everything the government is doing could be fantastic and wonderful, yet the whole can still end up being a bad idea when the whole turns out to be unaffordable. Of course it's wonderful if we don't have to consider costs, but we do.

I could also argue that if 4 year colleges have even in part become so expensive because of all the subsidized money available that bringing subsidized money to the community college will have an "unexpected result" so expected that one could hardly call it "unexpected" anymore.

> Obama isn't able to beef up much with Congress voting on the laws first. That might prove difficult given the current makeup of Congress.

Policy change can be sudden and radical, but durable shifts in political priorities often start with legislative proposals, which build support for the idea in the public consciousness, which translate into pressure on elected politicians, which turn into policies -- maybe not this year, and maybe not until after several election cycles.

But if you never propose anything that won't pass today, you never move things in the direction you prefer.

Congress doesn't seem to be shy about passing national security legislation. That often trumps partisan politics.

I think we've entered the age where we can no longer ignore our national IT infrastructure shortcomings. As someone who has had more than a few sysadmin jobs, and at a couple places you've heard of, its incredible how little security matters, how poorly software is written, how few developers can write secure code, and how management can force IT to make boneheaded implementations that bite everyone in the ass later.

I would love to see a HIPAA-type regulation for all businesses, encryption everywhere, force change of default credentials, etc. The wild west days of the internet need to come to an end.

No thanks. I can see this kind of legislation turning any online presence into a horribly expensive bureaucratic nightmare while accomplishing fuck-all security-wise. (At best.. Given current governments' track record, any privacy act would be all about stomping on people's privacy.)

I'd rather not be subjected to (and pay for) more security theater, or see every small business out there drown in a paper mill suitable for the fortune 500s.

We are already liable for any gross misconduct.

Do you honestly think patient information would be safer without HIPAA?

Do you honestly think the EU privacy laws that we don't have in the US aren't doing anything?

Its incredible how the anti-regulation types think everything is fine and that no regulation has ever worked.

As someone who has worked in multiple regulated industries, including with HIPAA, what they accomplish is rarely the intended goals.

Regulation is a weapon to be used by powerful interests to bash competitors. For example, utilities love regulation as it gives them a de-factor monopoly and predictable income.

The medical industry widely ignores HIPAA in a holistic way. Ask any practice you visit about their handling of medical records, IT security practices, etc. Heck, ask them if they still use Windows XP.

> For example, utilities love regulation as it gives them a de-factor monopoly and predictable income.

This is kind of nonsense argument, because most utilities are monopolies by design. The idea is to give utilities a predictable income stream in return for agreeing to abide by certain public interest policies.

I get that that is the idea. The reality is that most utilities pass along their expenses, whatever they are, into a "rate case" with a percentage tacked on top. That is opposed to every other business where more efficiency == more profit and decreasing prices due to competition.

Models of efficiency, they are not, to the point that their inefficiency severely hinders their ability to serve "the public interest." They also tend to use their size to squash any potential competitors in their space (see power companies with private solar and the telecom industry versus VOIP).

> I get that that is the idea. The reality is that most utilities pass along their expenses, whatever they are, into a "rate case" with a percentage tacked on top.

Again, that's by design. The public authority sets rates at some fixed cost plus reasonable rate of return on capital. The idea is to encourage potentially very expensive capital investment without the perceived danger of subjecting a critical utility to the ups and downs of market pricing.

And utilities act to squash competitors because lack of competition is the whole quid-pro-quo of being a utility. Utilities don't make Twitter-like 30% margins with double-digit growth. The reason private capital is willing to sink money into them is that they get their consistent 10-15% return on a regular basis. Competitors not only upset the arrangement, they can quickly jeopardize that margin.

I'm not defending regulated utilities. I think they're mostly a bad idea, but judging by the discussions around here where people talk about the wonderfulness of water utilities, lots of people are on board with sanctioned monopolies with guaranteed rates of return. But the flaws you're pointing to aren't "abuses of regulation"--they're a conscious bargain between municipalities and utilities.

> Do you honestly think patient information would be safer without HIPAA?

Quite possibly; the privacy and security portions of HIPAA were included to mitigate the risks associated with the push for electronic systems and standardized data that were more central to HIPAA -- and the enhanced privacy and security features added later in amendments to HIPAA were furthering that in the context of increased standardization and automation that was being promoted in the same legislation; without HIPAA, you might not have as much formal protection of patient data, but you also might have a lot less data in forms that were easy to compromise en masse in the first place.

(Of course, that would also have consequences for administrative efficiency and quality of care, and without HIPAA and the related subsequent acts that included those patient protections as mitigations to potential negative effects of their primary functions, the US might have the least efficient health care system in the developed world by an even larger margin than it currently does, which, even if HIPAA does net some increased risk to patient information, might not be worth the cost.)

> I can see this kind of legislation turning any online presence into a horribly expensive bureaucratic nightmare while accomplishing fuck-all security-wise.

One of the sources of a push for federal standards is frustration with multiple conflicting state standards doing the same thing.

I worry about the regulations being wrong or becoming wrong over time then being very difficult to change. What happens if we are legally obligated to engineer a system in an insecure manner and we can't fix it without a series of bureaucratic moves?

If sweeping regulations do come along, I hope there's a strong push for them to be loose or amiable enough to avoid these problems. For now, though, I'm skeptical.